Recent posts by KMAE on Kongregate

I was hoping for a little discussion on what you all like in idle games. Is it the idleness of it all, the interactivity, the graphics?

I like an idle game that has has a nice story. The graphics don’t necessarily have to be the greatest. I do enjoy some interactivity, but I think an idle game should remain idle as opposed to anti-idle.

This seems really interesting. I like making games, but get no motivation to do anything other than preliminary design. That said, I have started working on my card game again (Uno clone) and I have most of the art done for my point and click adventure… Perhaps this will give me the motivation I need.

When you press S to stick to the roof, you should adjust the animation when you also press D because it jumps. When you press S and A he faces left and stops and I would expect when you press S and D that he faces right and stops.

I was not able to do anything. I can jump around the screen, but it doesn’t scroll. It gets stuck to the right and when I go left I get a game over. Sorry, I wasn’t able to review it because of that.

The only ones I haven’t written down are those I’m not quite sure of. I usually let them stir around a little. Sometimes I forget some and sometimes I don’t. Then I may have some inspiration and then write it down. I had an idea for a small text game ala Don’t Shit Your Pants (Except a little better) but my wife thought it was tasteless so it got shelved.

Edit: Jason, I believe the horror genre is lacking here if you’re into that. Also I’ve heard a couple people looking for good text based adventure games.

You could actually do a better job with one of those these days, if you spent time on coding a good natural language interface, and avery interactive world.

In the original Zork, during testing, a player managed to repeatedly crash the game when they tried to perform an action. It was “put bathtub in backpack”. It was a valid command at the time, the developer had just never thought anyone would be silly enough to try and do that.

Hmm, see if I had done a game like Zork I would have had a default/error catcher so that instead of breaking anything it didn’t understand it would perhaps say “Isn’t that a silly thing to do.”

Thanks for all the comments guys. I wasn’t intending to mean that you should ignore bad games or games in genres that you don’t like. I was using the “Do what you love” philosophy. If you just do not get FPS games and you tried to make one, sure it might be decent but you probably wouldn’t have much fun doing it and it may lack in polish as a result.

I did say creativity takes some time to learn. I did not mean to say that creativity only comes from playing games. Certainly life experience plays into it. I believe much of the life experience when it comes to making games is by playing games though.

That book will certainly be on my list. Books do have their place in teaching.

Also, I added writing things down because making games is hard. If you try to keep it all in your head you’ll probably miss something. I have quite a few ideas and a few games out. Some ideas are in my head, some are scribbled on notebook pages and three have game design documents in a standard format. Of those three, two are well done. I left one alone for awhile, just came back to it and said man this is still a good idea. I should really get around to doing it.

Of course, I’m a big procrastinator so hah.

Edit: Jason, I believe the horror genre is lacking here if you’re into that. Also I’ve heard a couple people looking for good text based adventure games.

I’ve seen a lot of how to make a game requests, but I figured since this is the game “design” forum there should be posts on how to design a game. These are just a few of my thoughts right now.

If you have no idea where to start designing, play games. Figure out what type of games you like to play and then what you do and don’t like about them. If you have a basic idea you may, as others have done, come on here and ask for help. If you want to do it all yourself try to determine something that would be unique or stand out.

Creativity takes some time to learn. Also remember that all games need an interface that is easy to use, sound (usually music too), and sometimes story.

The next thing you need to do is write down your ideas. A great game has a game design document explaining everything about the game.

I may have ideas to add later. Any discussion of designing is welcome.

I second the motion for cosmic horror. It would be awesome to play a game that seems to start out as the standard badass space pirate only to accidentally provoke a mind boggling cosmic horror and spend the rest of the game running for your life as it devours civilizations while following your trail.

In an episode of Dr. Who they even find the devil on some rock in space. People love to run from cosmic horrors.

My opinion is that knowing how to code is useful, just like (as draganviper said) knowing some art, sound, narrative, etc. I have some coding background, about 2 years of a 4 year degree and it helps me to just think about how things move on the screen or how they may be done.

I do not believe though that you have to be a great programmer to be a good designer as long as you have a good team to back you up.

Well, I am busy too, but will probably participate. Screenshot will follow below in an edit.
I would like a whisper too so I get an email.
I vote for RA2, just because I haven’t played Sol and I am awful at DO.

Thank you for all your comments. I know I can do it any way, I just wanted to see if one way was considered easier than another or is preferred.

UG: All of the cards have the same back. I am making a version of Uno and so I have 54 unique card fronts which I have currently .png’s of each one and one MovieClip with 55 frames. I anticipate Uno will be data driven, determining the card value and color and any specials (reverse and draw). I’ll have to look into lookup tables as I don’t have much experience with those. I have experience with classes, but I think it may be more difficult to go that way.

parallactic: I am more experienced with classes. As I said above though I think I will find a lookup table to be easier to work with. I have, as I said above a 54 indexed timeline with each frame named, but I was dreading putting all that in an array. I suppose I’ll have to catalogue them eventually, no matter what I do.

qwerber: That’s was I was thinking. I had heard that sprite sheets were more efficient, but I don’t have experience with them so I wasn’t sure if it would be any easier or just different. For this game I don’t think efficiency will be that big a deal anyways.

Senekis: I do have a lot of experience recently with using XML and perhaps I could go this way. Although I don’t have near as many cards as you I did feel it might be difficult to work with a sheet like that. Perhaps I will just leave sprite sheets for animations instead of static images.

So, what I will be doing then is breaking out my cards into individual MovieClips then and seeing if I can tinker with a lookup or XML.

If it makes any difference, after my first game is released I am going to attempt a multiplayer aspect with a followup. I figured I better be able to program single player first though :3

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